A saying among logicians, “one man’s reductio is another’s modus ponens”: having reduced an opponent’s argument to absurdity, the temptation to swivel to an alternative conclusion.
Against this psychological bent in logic I struggle.
A reductio leaves us with ashes.
The Phoenix-like inferences, you see rise, are moist apparitions, tear-ghosts, every bit beyond your will as the estimious sentiments evoked at a proof’s finality: quod erat demonstratum.
At the top of the mountain, over the grated pit, the vulture-logician picks corpses clean.
When the pieces come white and slip through the grate of the Tower of Silence, I enter to cart them away and build a cage with them, which one day, when large enough, will house the moist apparitions in a sort of zoo for the edification of the plain and simple person, the unborn, and for the kind eyes of God.[/b]
Once you come face to face with the reality that, one by one, we are all reduced to ashes speculations of this sort become all the more pressing…or all the more absurd.
Let the vulture-logicians examine their knowledge of this when the bugs are picking their corpses clean.
The age of therapy—inaugurated by Freud, etiologically dead-ended by Wittgenstein, et al., early heralded by Hume and maybe Pyrrho, vermiculated by Foucault, Derrida, and friends, (why stop here? why not include everyone in the history of Western literature and philosophy since Gilgamesh and Enkidu?)—is soon to be superceded—not for lack of imagination on anyone’s part—by an age of spite, resentment, by an age in which a surfeit of pride makes the sick hold their heads up high and the cured higher still and the-never-having-been-afflicted able to see to the ends of Alexander’s estate.
Finally, by an age of old age.[/b]
Indeed
[b]Mr Bernstein:
Old age. It’s the only disease, Mr. Thompson, that you don’t look forward to being cured of.[/b]
Not counting of course all the millions of folks that do.
[I get closer everyday]
Is there a philosophy of dying?
Or does it still all come down to God or oblivion?
This knowing about everyone but ourselves is what is meant being a ‘social animal’.
We are best groomed by others… It strikes me as sad.
I am not made to feel closeness, or I feel that closeness as suffocation.
Your ambition to see my condition eased…well, do you see what I mean?
Wittgenstein spoke of the experience of feeling “safe” as though it were some profound discovery at the bottom of ethics, as indeed it is, despite what we are asked to believe.
But for me, it is too quickly followed, not with the accepted emotional valence, not with warmth, instead with an extreme breath-sucking heat, but not…
My illness, if you wish to call it that, stems in great part from your wishing to make me well.
(A thousand years ago it would have been unmysteriously labeled ‘sin’.
What do you suppose we will call it that long from now?)[/b]
Who said anything about wishing to make you well? Oh, right, you did. And a thousand years from now you and I won’t be around to call it anything. Not even in ten, perhaps.
What do you think I mean by insulting God?
(The compulsion, I don’t fully understand.)
I think of him every moment, so much is clear.
Piety?: But for the fact that he has no right to exist.[/b]
My compulsion stems from a belief that there is no God. He has to be invented in order to have something I can pummel when the pain of living demands an answer that is not there.
I’d even grant Him the right to exist if I could.
Someday, it’s possible, I will feel closeness: you will have to lend me your imagination
If this means what I think it means it means he has never been close to another either. But I don’t think your imagination will help me at all.
Partiality toward blood- or familial-ties is not (except in democratic politics) judged another prejudice to uncover and expunge.
Should we ever though, then we will have to crack down on emotional ties.[/b]
Indeed, I already have. But not in the manner in which, say, Hank Reardon came to crack down on his.
Fellini, my cat-friend, is teaching me closeness.
I’ve never met anyone who, by their willingness to be observed, has more convinced me that they are capable of loving.
How to explain this: their powers of persuasion are inadequate, or my discernment, or I am looking in the wrong place altogether: I should be observing how an animal might favor them.
It is a quality that can only be observed in a flawless mirror, not directly, no matter how closely.
Dogs, however, are still viewed as the faithful companions of choice. With them you don’t have to earn the love…you just have to not kick them.
The motion from the irrational to the rational is the classic move in art.
The movement in reverse is romantic.
Not either alone.
It is clear system-building or reductive philosophy is a species of the former…
…The importance of art is that it permits us a moment or two of what it is like not to think, and not to deserve anything, to re-experience being adiaphorous—reason enough, in itself, for common morality to perceive it as mortal enemy.[/b]
But certainly not of philosophy exchanged “down here”. For that we have the art of existentialism. The nihilist reading text with a red pencil and a shredder.
Equally fickle in their development, moral and aesthetic values—but the latter travel in circles (wide arcs from our perspective).
Both move, a possible and ominous surprise to some about ethics.
The moral is linear, “the straight and narrow”, and like an arrow in flight, it is displacing, moving with a very clear (if, just the same, highly deniable) direction.
A vector, aimed at the Good, the Ultimate Good, that is to say (that is to whisper), Death.[/b]
That “thump” you now hear is, in this regard, as close as I ever seem to come to a whisper.
So the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, has the suppressed qualifier: “all of a sudden”.
In due course, without impatience, and with respect for the moral order, which is not the same as ‘upholding’ the moral order: it has us firmly by the scruff and scarcely needs our complicity.
We are only free to march to the scaffold like, deep down, the good aristocrats we are.
But the history of art are the paths traced by stray balloons through the vapors, squatting over the moribund city, and though there are infinite reasons to, we are not rational and so there is no requirement to be sad.
The joy of death is difficult to celebrate but the muses do not skimp on supplies.
To sum up the Decalogue, trite in its profundity: “Be a good sport about death.”
When you reckon that being reasonable here is like aiming for the bullseye and hoping to at least hit the board, sadness unto death is nothing less than missing the entire wall.
“What a jerk! A snide-ass tease, waving your perfumed pussy around!”—to paraphrase a male friend of O’s on reading some of this.
Perfume?
The logic of perfume would be a fit subject for a poet-logician.[/b]
Years ago, O gave me some of this to read. And here I am again treading water. And none the wiser of course. But that still seems logical to me.
As logician the imperative is to labor the obvious; as poet to make it cryptic.
Making logic cryptic is merely to expose its limitations. After all, human existence makes a mockery of it everyday.
I think gall, like any other ‘humour’, should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This gets complicated in interpersonal situations. It does not follow that innocent gall means the other person is guilty. However we rarely allow gall and other humours to develop and be expressed. (rather than, say, dumped, which happens, often in a way too verbal form)
One interpersonal pattern can be that the person is really angry at themselves and the other person not getting it is reflecting back a part of themselves that is not reconciled with the ego. Sure, this does happen, and it happens here. A lot.
But we can use interpretations like this, or simple blanket judgments of gall, to gloss over the fact that gall can be right on. There may be some distortion in it. It may be the case that mixing it in with intellectual dialogue is hysterically optimistic in the extreme,
but some ideas are killing us and the planet.
“You seem to want to side with oppressors against their victims?”
The best I can do, by way of explanation, is to note lamely that every oppressor was and will be again a victim, hard as it is for the presently oppressed to consider.
What hater would listen to what I say?
They would listen as carefully as some Nazis heard Nietzsche.
I ask you to show more discrimination than is generally expected of you or you customarily credit yourself with in polite company.
I speak up to you.
You don’t deserve it, but, in the nature of the case, I have placed myself beneath you.
The view from here you will never grow accustomed to.[/b]
And what of those who oppress by calling it something else? And what of those who believe [in all sincerity] it really is something else?
And noting how it once was and will again be the other way around seems particularly silly in this day and age.
How Hindu. I don’t think this is the case, actually.
If you mean those who hate because they are oppressed, bruno, then it might be best not to start by siding with their oppressors. This leaves a possibility they will listen. Chiding them that the oppressors have also suffered or that some cosmic balance is on the way in the future is likely not going to warm their cockles.
If you mean those who hate as oppressors, that is tough. They need to notice what they feel before they hate the oppressed, and given how those feelings will likely challenge their self-image, they are likely not going to want to go there.
So for me the only route is to ask them how it all actually feels. How does the system of oppression feel to them. Is it working, even for them? (best not to use the word oppression when asking) If they have some disatisfaction they can notice and are willing to mention, this might leave the door slightly ajar to a [future where they would be happier and less oppressive. Self-interest seems the only hope there.
Which is all of them.
Which is nearly all of them. But most know, on some level, that they are not really coming forward with their deepest imprinting - women are manipulative cunts, or whatever.
Bianco Luno is an alter ego used by Seattle philosopher Victor Munuz. The aphorisms above are taken from notebooks written in the 1990s. I came into contact with him through a letter exchange with Olivia, a friend of his.
I am merely quoting from the notebooks. This is not an actual exchange between us. It is just me reacting to what I construe to be a fellow ironist. And how he would react to that I cannot say.
If you wish to explore his thinking today [and in the manner in which philosophy is pursued academically] he can be found at the Seattle Analytic Philosophy Club. Here:
I understood this, in general terms. I knew it was you quoting and reacting. I used his name in the post just to show I knew I was not responding to you.
i actually went to that site and joined earlier. I haven’t gone back and posted yet. I didn’t find a place I wanted to jump in.
I think what we’re up against, Ambig, are the classicists. They’re up against what philosophy promised them what they could be. As Rorty points out: they want something that transcends history. We, on the other hand, simply want to be part of history. We both claim nihilism (me as the nihilistic perspective, you as just plain nihilism).
You think, maybe, that we are right now in the continental D-day on the beaches of the analytic?
The analytic, as it is now, is owned by global Capitalism.